Diminished, Dismissed, Misdiagnosed: When Doctors Don't Trust Women

Rana Mungin was 30-years old when she died of Covid-19 in March. A black teacher in Brooklyn with asthma and hypertension, she was twice diagnosed with having a panic attack in an ER, despite a fever and shortness of breath.

That reaction and lack of appropriate response by doctors was not a fluke. It happens frequently if you are female, especially if you’re a black woman, as several recent books about women’s health care reveal. That’s not news to women’s healthcare advocates, but perhaps now healthcare providers who may not have considered inherent problems involving diagnosing and treating women will be more enlightened.

Possibly the most important book on this issue is Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery. Adding to the impressive and important literature of women’s health, Dusenbery addresses two of the biggest impediments to women getting good care, the “knowledge gap” and the “trust gap.”

 The knowledge gap refers to the fact that many doctors don’t know enough about women’s bodies, their symptoms, or the diseases that affect them disproportionately. The trust gap speaks to the stereotyping of women as unreliable reporters at best, and hysterical at worst. These gaps are apt to occur more often with black women. Dusenbery’s central and necessarily repeated mantra is that women are either not trusted when they report symptoms or they are labeled crazy, malingering, or opioid- addicted.

“This book is not about a few sexist bad apples within the medical profession,” Dusenbery says in her introduction. “It is about how all health care providers, like all of us, have unconscious biases by virtue of living in a culture that holds certain stereotypes about women.”

These biases are revealed over and over again as women share their first-person horror stories of trivialization, misdiagnosis, not being believed and more, whether they suffer chronic pain, autoimmune diseases, reproductive problems, heart attacks or other life-threatening emergencies. 

Here’s one example. “I was asking for help. But my doctor said, ‘I don’t think you’re at the point where medication is an option, and it can be addictive. Keep exercising and doing yoga and maybe consider meditating. Try to get more sleep. If your symptoms persist, come back in a few months.”

Here’s another. A black woman I know was found to have multiple cysts in her body. She had gained weight and stopped menstruating. What did the doctor tell her? “You have a demanding job and a young child. I think it’s stress.” That opinion was rendered with no diagnostic workup, no referral to an endocrinologist, no curiosity or concern about what systemic problem might be causing the troubling symptoms.

Dusenbery backs up her conclusions with copious references to research studies, women’s personal stories, and other books in the women’s health canon, as she exposes “bad medicine and lazy science” in compelling and convincing ways.

“Doctors think that men have heart attacks and women have stress” speaks to the frequency with which women are told their symptoms are due to stress, a theme played over and over again in the stories women share. “It’s hard work behaving as a credible patient,” as one woman said, underscoring how often pain is deemed to be “all in your head.” 

A chapter in Dusenbery’s book called “This is Not Normal” reveals how often women must insist on having diagnostic workups. “Young women aren’t the only group of patients who frequently find their symptoms dismissed as ‘normal’ by healthcare providers. The tendency to normalize symptoms associated with women’s reproductive functions finds echoes in the way elderly patients, trans patients, and overweight patients are often treated.”

 “The Career Women’s Disease” points to the modern version of age-old myths suggesting that motherhood and work are incompatible. One 20th century “expert” on endometriosis notoriously stated that the painful condition was on the rise because of “delayed and infrequent childbearing.” The 19th century version of this myth was that if a woman exercised her brain her uterus would atrophy.

Autoimmune diseases are especially challenging for physicians who receive about five hours of lectures on this difficult topic during their entire medical education. Research has shown that women with these diseases, like with many others, see about five physicians over a period of seven years before receiving a correct diagnosis.

The frustration of not being believed or properly diagnosed is intense.  As Dusenbery puts it, “The long, frustrating search for a diagnosis is such a common theme running through the stories of women patients that many feel immense relief to finally get a diagnosis, any diagnosis. Being sick without knowing why is very stressful; being sick and told ‘nothing’s wrong,’ is more stressful still.” 

Delayed, downplayed, poorly diagnosed illnesses are not simply a medical issue. In this time of “intersectionality,” it’s important to realize that race, class, age, gender and more come into play. As one analyst put it, “if you’re not wealthy, not white, and not heterosexual, you may be receiving less than optimal care.”

That’s why Rana Mungin’s story is so sad, and why Dusenbery’s message, echoing that of other healthcare advocates, is so important. “Listen to women. Trust us when we say we’re sick. Start there, and you’ll find we have a a lot of knowledge to share.”  Books like Doing Harm go a long way in arming women for the task.

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Elayne Clift has been a women’s healthcare educator and advocate for over three decades. She lives in Saxtons River, Vt.  

The Death of Privacy: Big Brother is Watching You

Every day I feel guilty numerous times, not because of something I’ve done wrong.  It happens because of something I haven’t done. Although I’m an activist worried about what is happening in the world in which we now live, I don’t sign online petitions, answer surveys, or vote on Facebook posts or in emails, no matter how urgent the issue.  Nor do I answer phone calls if I don’t recognize the number.

These sins of omission are easily explained. I don’t respond to requests or calls to “make a difference” because it’s very likely I am being surveilled. It’s likely you are too. The fact is our privacy is rapidly eroding and becoming a thing of the past.

Chilling evidence is emerging about how readily everything from our whereabouts to our political views and personal preferences are known and shared. The New York Times and other publications have reported on this issue and explained how spying on our privacy is done and how information is being used.

A recent report in The New York Times revealed that data used by the government is provided by location data companies that “collect precise movements of all smartphone-owning Americans through their phone apps.” The data these companies collect and store is then sold to third party buyers, including the government. And because the data is for sale, the government is convinced that no legal oversight is needed.

The Wall Street Journal points out that the Trump administration “has bought access to a commercial database that maps movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement.” Customs and Border Protection thinks that practice is fine. As a spokesperson told The Times, “While the C.B.P. is being provided access to location information, it’s important to note that such information does not include cellular phone tower data, is not ingested in bulk, and does not include the individual user’s identity.” Really? Shouldn’t that be challenged in court? And what exactly does “ingested in bulk” mean anyway? Who sees the data, where is it kept, and for how long?

The truth is that when we accept those long, difficult to read “terms and conditions” that keep being revised and stuffed into our Inboxes, we really have no idea what data is being collected about us and how it is being used. More worrisome is that we are consenting to possible future uses that are unpredictable.

That’s why Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts wrote in a 2018 decision, “When the government tracks the location of a cellphone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.”

 This whole mess started with an Australian guy who invented an app that allows facial recognition (which is why Hong Kong protesters wear face masks). His company, Clearview AI, means that an uploaded picture of someone can be linked to public photos of that person and to other links where the photos have appeared. According to The Times, the database of more than three billion images that Clearview has were taken from millions of websites, including Facebook and YouTube. Federal and state law enforcement, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, have used the Clearview app along with over 600 law enforcement agencies that used it just in the past year.

“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” a co-director of the Santa Clara University High Tech Institute in California told The Times.  “Imagine a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”

Given our present political climate, thoughts of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 come to mind. Considered one of the most terrifying novels ever written, it showed what actions individuals can take when given too much power. In the story the political “Party” takes control over most of the world’s population resulting in individualism and independent thinking being banned.  Everyone is manipulated -- and under constant surveillance. “Big Brother” is watching them. The members of the “Party” use force and mind control to ensure that individuals are kept in line. Anyone who tries to live by their own rules (or tells the truth) is labeled a traitor and terribly punished.

 “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship,” Orwell wrote.

Tactics like face recognition surveillance used today against immigrants could easily be used tomorrow for enforcement of other nefarious laws. That’s why Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), head of the Oversight and Reform Committee in the House, is calling for lawmakers to hold hearings and to protect people legally from abuses that can occur when law enforcement and others use Clearview and other private entities to track people.

“I am deeply concerned by reports that the Trump administration has been secretly collecting cellphone data, without warrants, to track the location of millions of people across the United States to target individuals for deportation,” Maloney told The Times. “Such Orwellian government surveillance threatens the privacy of every American.”

Imagining a New Normal

What will it be like, I wonder, when this terrible pandemic ends? Sure, we will never take toilet paper, pasta, or flour for granted again. We may feel less guilty about binge watching TV. Maybe we’ll even say “I love you” more often. But how will we be changed personally, professionally, culturally?  What lifestyle changes will we choose to make? What will “community” look like? Where will we work and how will we play?

No one knows for sure how we will be irrevocably altered by what has happened, but sociologists, psychologists, writers, and homespun “experts” are beginning to suggest answers to those questions, and to speculate on, or idealize, a remodeled future. Some of these people were invited to weigh in on a “new normal” in a recent article in Politico.

Communications professor Deborah Tannen thinks that having been so vulnerable to calamity will change us forever such that we will become compulsive hand washers who distance ourselves from others. Some analysts counter with the idea that we’ll be drawn together in real and virtual communities that we may not have considered joining or building before we experienced the loneliness of isolation. I agree with their assessment. I think we’ll become closer to family and friends, some of whom we’ve already re-connected with as a result of the pandemic.

Peter Coleman, a psychology professor, suggests that the shock of Covid-19 could put an end to the “escalating political and cultural polarization we’ve been trapped in, and could help us to change course toward greater national solidarity and functionality.” Sociologist Eric Klineberg adds that market-based models for social organization will fail. “When this ends,” he posits, “we will reorient our politics and make substantial new investments in public goods, especially for health and public services.” Given the blatant flaws in our health care system that have been exposed during the current crisis Americans will surely demand urgently needed healthcare reform, whether we call it Medicare for All or universal health care.

The digital lifestyle will likely take on new meaning and new tasks, as Sherry Turkle of MIT says. Whether it’s watching a performance, taking yoga or meditation classes, communicating with legislators, staying connected to long-distance friends and family, or telecommuting to work there are measurable benefits (and some drawbacks) that accompany such a change. One of the benefits is a cleaner environment, as demonstrated by the unpolluted air over cities like Beijing and Sao Paulo, Venetian canals no longer smelling like sewers, rivers running clean again, and the earth’s surface quieting down, which all attest to the benefits of living less frenetic lives and appreciating nature’s healing gifts.  

Two things that will make a comeback in the new normal are a renewed respect for science, and the realization that good governance along with ethical institutions are essential to a functioning democracy, writer Michiko Kakutani suggests. Applying lessons learned from the Trump administration’s failures, he believes people will realize that “government institutions need to be staffed with experts, and decisions need to be made through a reasoned policy process predicated on evidence-based science and geopolitical knowledge.  … We need to remember that public trust is crucial to governance, and that trust depends on telling the truth.”

Consistent with the urgency of good governance in this country is the recognition that we live in a globalized world.  Participation in international organizations, cooperation with other nations, and empathy for multitudes of people who live in conditions we cannot imagine, whether in shanty towns, refugee camps, detention centers, or on the streets has become essential. We can no longer avert our eyes when it comes to human frailty and suffering. 

In the U.S. we also can no longer live with the stark divide between an insanely wealthy one percent world while the 99 percent struggle to survive. As one pundit put it, change is inevitable and social justice actions will make the Occupy Wall Street movement look like child’s play.

There is another change that hasn’t received sufficient attention: More women are likely to be in leadership positions given their proven expertise in handling the pandemic and modeling leadership at all levels. Whether mayors, governors, community organizers, or prime ministers, women have proven their political and practical skills.

For example, New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s early actions, including shutting down tourism and imposing an immediate month-long lockdown, limited the spread of Covid-19 and the death toll dramatically. So did the actions of Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president, who ordered all planes arriving from Wuhan to be inspected as soon as the outbreak there was identified.  She also opened an epidemic command center and ramped up production of personal protective equipment resulting in a stunningly low number of Covid-19 cases and deaths. These two examples help illustrate that women have proven their decision-making and managerial skills, especially in a crisis.

Julio Gambuto, writing for Cognoscenti, noted that “this is our chance to define a new version of normal, to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes us truly proud. …We can do it in our communities, in what organizations we support, what truths we tell. We can do it nationally by considering “to whom we give power.”

We need only look to New Zealand and Taiwan for models.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

Never Again? The Rising Epidemic of AntiSemitism

A shooting in a Jersey City Jewish market. Memorials in remembrance of a massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Cries of “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville. College campus offices, dorms and walls slathered with swastikas. Navy cadets flashing the sign of white supremacy. Cars, offices, homes, synagogues, schools defaced with slogans and swastikas in cities and towns across America. Donald Trump Jr.’s Facebook post of a cup for liberals to cry into covered in gold Stars of David. In France graves desecrated in an old Jewish cemetery and a Holocaust survivor murdered. German warnings that Jews shouldn’t wear yarmulkes or Stars of David in public.

In 2018 anti-Semitic attacks killed more Jews around the world than in any year in decades. Last year saw startling new numbers and acts of violence as well. Anti-Semitism is spiking in alarming ways and in numerous places while calls rise for stronger security measures and government action, but not the kind that Donald Trump promulgated in an Executive Order just before the end of 2019.

Using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the president’s order withholds federal money from colleges and universities that fail to counter discrimination against Jews.  It is at best a misguided gesture, and at worst a threat to First Amendment rights. Aimed at silencing opposition to Israel’s overt oppression, violence, and denial of Palestinian people’s human rights, the order is an attempt to put an end to Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movements.

The BDS movement was started by Palestinians which accounts in part for why it is so abhorred by many Jews and Israeli sympathizers.  But BDS has evolved into a global strategy that uses economic measures to help end tragic discrimination and injustice, as it did successfully in South Africa under the Apartheid government. Its most prominent funder is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which has provided over $1 million to BDS-supporting groups since 2013.

This thinly veiled measure by the president may look like a gesture of concern but realistically it doesn’t begin to address the real source of violent anti-Semitism in America. Stopping public debate on college campuses or threatening workers with dismissal if they openly support BDS does little to tackle the problem emanating from white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups, many of which find inspiration in the words and deeds of Adolf Hitler and his hideous henchmen.

Donald Trump has frequently demonstrated his own anti-Semitic tendencies, despite having a Jewish daughter, son-in-law, and three Jewish grandchildren. He has endorsed crude caricatures of Jews, especially when they include reference to money. He told the conservative Israeli American Council in a 2018 speech that a wealth tax would put Jews out of business. “A lot of you are in the real estate business,” he said. “I know you [and] you’re all brutal killers.” In a speech when the U.S. Embassy was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Trump told Council members, “You have Jewish people…and they don’t love Israel enough.”

Now, to make his case against BDS movements, the president has gone so far as to posit that Judaism is a nationality, as well as a religion. That’s deeply upsetting to me and many other Jews. It has serious possible ramifications, one of them being a set-up for further immigration discrimination and rejection.

Trump signed the “Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism” in December at a White House Chanukah reception attended by evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress, who famously said in 2010, “You can’t be saved being a Jew.” The order drew praise from some Jewish organizations, and individuals like Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, as well as vociferous criticism from others. It also drew a vocal backlash from Palestinian activists who said it will chill legitimate free speech that criticizes the Israeli government, especially for its human rights abuses.

Some Jewish leaders worry about its implications for the Jewish community at large. Rabbi Hara Person, the chief executive of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, told The New York Times that the order feels dangerous. “I’ve heard people say this feels like the first step toward us wearing yellow stars.”

I was born a Jew, and I remain a secular Jew. That is my religion and my ethnic heritage. I feel deeply my connection to other Jewish people, and to our collective history and culture. At the same time, I am an American. That is my nationality by birth, although as Virginia Woolf said, “As a woman I have no nation. As a woman, I want no nation. As a woman the world is my nation.”

Judaism is neither a race nor a nationality. It is simply, and beautifully, one of the world’s great religions, nothing more, or less.

Everyone needs to understand and respect that, including the president of the United States. And everyone, most especially the president, needs to understand as well that the growing epidemic of global anti-Semitism, reinvigorated by the president’s words and actions, is a real and present danger that threatens the future for all of us. 

“Never again?” I don’t think so.  Here we are, and sadly, “again,” it seems, is now. 

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When Do I Get to Feel Good About My Heritage and My Home?

When I was a pre-teen growing up in small-town New Jersey I loved the fact that I was a first-generation American. My parents, with their families, had fled anti-Semitic pogroms in Russian Ukraine as small children, and all of them had built new lives in America. It seemed dramatic to have a family history of hardship and courage, a unique culture, special food, and a language I could neither speak nor understand except for a few words. I liked knowing that I had Russian roots, with its great writers, composers and ballerinas as well as a mysterious history.

But I was robbed of that sense of pride as a result of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who rabidly tried to destroy communism in 1950s America, even where it didn’t exist. McCarthy viciously accused politicians, actors, journalists, teachers and others of subversion or treason without evidence.  Ordinary people across the country began to fear him and what came to be called the Second Red Scare. My father was one of them.  “Don’t let on about Russia!” he warned. “Just keep quiet about it.” And so I never talked about my heritage again.

Some years later while in high school I went through a period when I was proudly Jewish. I read the Old Testament from cover to cover and fasted on Yom Kippur, holiest of days as we solemnly embraced the Jewish new year at the mournful sound of the Shofar being blown. I read Jewish writers and wept at Holocaust stories. The young rabbi in our small town was a lovely man who with his family represented modern Jewish life to me. He also understood my desire to celebrate my Jewish identity in the days before girls had bat mitzvahs, a coming of age ceremony at age 13, enjoyed by boys at their bar mitzvahs. And so, reading from the story of Esther, he devoted one March Friday evening to a confirmation service for me.

During this time, I felt enormously proud of Israel for creating a post-Holocaust oasis for Diaspora Jews, and giving all Jews a homeland and sense of national pride. But as I grew into adulthood while Israel’s politics were becoming ominous, and as I learned more about the country’s history and came to understand its punishing behavior toward the Palestinian people who share its land, that feeling of pride began to slip away from me. I wondered and worried about things I read or overheard in conversations, both pro-Israel and against. How, I wondered, could a people who had suffered so much, visit such suffering upon others?

Then I grew older and became more deeply familiar with American history and its treatment of indigenous peoples, its slavery and continuing racism, its homophobia, misogyny, despicable corruption, incipient violence, false alters to self-righteousness and sharply dangerous shifts right such that today we can actually cage dying children. Now I find that I’ve lost virtually all sense of national pride. The truth is it’s hard to feel proud when you’re anxious and afraid, and when you’re more likely to shudder than to sing a country’s falsely premised praises.

As I write these words, cognizant of the adoration of the almighty dollar while the planet gasps for life, I find the platitudes of our political rhetoric not only hollow, but deeply shameful, especially now that we are on the cusp of actually losing our democracy to dictatorship as we quite possibly enter an era when we may be called upon to witness and engage in the utter abrogation of any national decency.

Joe McCarthy eventually got his comeuppance, the Soviet Union disbanded, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Cold War took a long break - until now. The Vietnam War ended finally, although it will never leave our consciousness as we continue to trudge on endlessly conducting untoward military action that robs so many of so much and keeps the world in danger.

In the 1990s my husband and I visited Israel. It was a conflicted journey.  As a Jew, there is no denying that the concept of an Israeli state gets inside you, and you feel a connection to the country when you stand on its land. At the same time, as a feminist, I had a really hard time reconciling the misogyny inherent in Jewish orthodoxy and seeing it at play. Further, and ever more vigorously I find myself, once again, feeling a sense of shame for my heritage, because of Israel’s political behavior toward other human beings, and the lack of response to that behavior by so many other Jews. I experience deep sadness, because others more powerful than I have rendered it impossible for me to embrace my Jewishness with as much love and pride as I once did.

Now the question for me is will I be doomed to forfeit yet again any pride I might have felt for my country and my heritage? Will I be expected to be quiet, to behave like a proper Jew, to be a good citizen? Or dare I believe that the dangerous path on which I find myself (along with others) will not leave me (or others), scarred as we continue moving forward, healing, and hopefully into a more enlightened, safer, caring world?  

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

A Growing Epidemic of Violence Threatens Black Transgender Women

Last month being LGBT History Month, it seems timely to think about what is happening to primarily Black transgender women across the country. It’s not simply timely, it’s urgent given the growing number of mostly Black trans women being murdered.

In 2018 at least 26 murders of transgender people occurred in the U.S. The majority were Black trans women. The year before that the number killed was 29. So far this year at least 26 transgender people, largely Black trans women, have been killed by acquaintances, partners and strangers. The numbers recorded for any year may be low due to under-reporting by victim families and law enforcement. These killings align with other significant factors that render trans people more prone to violent death, such as poverty, homelessness, healthcare barriers, depression, homophobia, racism and sexism.

These tragedies demand a human face. Baily Reeves, 17, was fatally shot in Baltimore, Maryland in September. Little is known about the circumstances surrounding her death.  Jordan Cofer, 22, who was out only to close friends and used male pronouns on social media, was among the nine victims killed in a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio in August. A friend told the media he was “one of the sweetest people you’d ever meet, a true saint, but he was scared constantly.” Dana Martin, 31, “beloved by everybody,” was fatally shot in Montgomery, Alabama and found in a roadside ditch in her car. Claire Legato, 21, “full of life,” died of a gunshot wound to her head in Cleveland, Ohio. There are 22 more stories like this so far this year.

Two troubling cases remain unresolved. A 25-year old woman named Medina, denied treatment for a severe health problem in an ICE facility, died at a Texas hospital hours after being released by ICE. Another woman, Polanco, died in a cell at the notorious Riker’s Island prison in New York.

According to GLAAD.org, the American Medical Association has declared the killing of trans women and other trans people an “epidemic” exacerbated by a variety of social issues, including the fact that transgender people face high levels of discrimination and poverty. According to one national survey of transgender people, their level of unemployment is twice the rate of the general population. Transgender people are four times more likely to live in poverty, and 90 percent of them report experiencing harassment, mistreatment, or discrimination on the job. Access to healthcare is extremely limited for transgender people, in part because until recently private insurers have treated transition-related medical care as if it were cosmetic. Some procedures are still not covered, and it continues to be difficult to find a provider who is knowledgeable about transgender healthcare.  Sadly, 41 percent of transgender people reported attempting suicide in one large study.

“We are the most afraid we’ve ever been,” Mariah Moore of the Transgender Law Center, says. Kayla Gore, a transgender advocate in New Orleans, adds that the threat of violence is “always forefront in our minds, when we’re leaving home, going to work, going to school.”

It’s important to understand what “transgender” – and sexual orientation” – mean, among other terms, if violence born of fear and prejudice is to be adequately addressed. According to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, a transgender person is someone whose sex assigned at birth is different from who they know themselves to be on the inside. It includes people who have medically transitioned and people who have not.  Sexual orientation refers to emotional, romantic, sexual and relational attraction to someone else, whether you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight or use another word to accurately describe identity. “Gender identity” is one’s internal concept of self as male, female, a blend of both, or neither.  “Transition” is a process that some transgender people undergo when they decide to live as the gender with which they identify. They are not “becoming” a man or a woman; they are starting to live openly as their true gender. Transitioning is a difficult and private decision. People who make that decision deserve respect.

Th reality of living a transgender life makes LGBT History Month an important time for increasing awareness, acceptance, and safety for trans people. Started in 1994 by a Missouri high school teacher to educate schools, religious institutions, and communities about LGBTQ people, it led to LGBTQ Pride Month, celebrated in June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. It has grown from a day of Gay Pride to a month of events.

All the activity surrounding LBGTQ history and life is important. So is the need for lawmakers to strengthen hate crime legislation and for law enforcement and media to do a better job of addressing relevant issues.  As Sarah McBride of the Human Rights Campaign puts it, “the prejudices don’t add upon one another, they multiply upon one another.”  They lead to the murder of innocent human beings, largely women of color, who simply want to live their lives free of fear.

Surely that is not asking too much.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

Watch Out World! Here Come the Youth and They're Full of Promise

When Greta Thunberg stood before the United Nations recently, stared diplomats in the face with determination, and said emphatically, “How Dare You!” the world watched, gasping, and feeling that things might just be on the brink of changing for the better.

When Malala Yousafzai survived an assassination attempt because she challenged her country and the world to educate girls around the globe, people saw a glimmer of hope for half the world’s population.

When students like Emma Gonzales and David Hogg from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida spoke eloquently about the urgency of gun control, the world dared to hope that America would end its killing fields.

Greta Thunberg started a school strike for climate change outside the Swedish parliament in 2018. She hasn’t stopped advocating to save the planet since. Today over 100,000 school children are part of her movement, Fridays for Future. Her plenary speeches before the United Nations went viral and a performance this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and again when she faced the UN in New York daring them to take action for the sake of the world’s youth were extraordinary.

Malala, the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history, was eleven years old when she blogged on the BBC abut her life under the Taliban in Pakistan and starred in a New York Times documentary about life in the middle of military occupation. Always an activist, she  established the Malala Education Foundation to help poor girls go to school. Her near death when she was shot on a school bus sparked an international movement that flourishes today as she studies at Oxford University in England.

The “Parkland kids,” led by Emma Gonzales, David Hogg and others, rocked the world when they stood up to the National Rifle Association, and a government in thrall to the gun lobby. Refusing “thoughts and prayers” and calling for political action they woke up the country in a way that even the Newtown Massacre hadn’t.  When Gonzales “call[ed] BS” on the hollow words of politicians, and when Hogg and others took to social media, the country saw what real activism looks like. Today the energy of the Parkland students, many of whom have graduated and can now vote, is focused on registering youth to vote, and ensuring that they do.

Youth activism isn’t confined to a few well-known faces. The world is full of young activists and social changemakers offering genuine hope for a future world that can clean up its moral, economic and environmental act on a fragile but sustainable planet.

Payla Jangid is one of them. After escaping child slavery in India, she became a children’s rights advocate and is currently the leader of her village’s Child Parliament, which meets to discuss “various issues like lack of separate toilets for girls in schools and the need to stop child marriage,” she says. Like Malala, she advocates for girls’ education going door to door to explain to parents that children need support to grow.

Kelvin was just six years old when the violent civil war in Sierra Leone ended. Despite his youth and lack of education he quickly became one of the country’s leading technological inventors. At 11, he made electronics from trash. At 13, he made batteries with found materials and build a generator to power a community radio station. In 2012 he went to MIT to present his inventions to students there. Today he is an Honorary Board member of EMERGENCY USA, working to provide medical and surgical care to victims of war and poverty.

Sisters Melati and Isabel who live in Bali started their own company there when they were 10 and 12 years old.  Bye Bye Plastic Bags was inspired by Rwanda, which had banned polyethylene bags in 2008. Nelson Mandela, Lady Diana, and Mahatma Gandhi also inspired the sisters to “be the change [they] wanted to see.” Following beach cleanups, petitions and government help, their organization now employs 25 people and has teams in 15 countries. Bali has been declared plastic bag free, and the Indonesian government is banning all plastic bags by 2021.

Closer to home, when the water crisis in Flint, Michigan became acute, eight-year old Mari Copeny wrote to President Obama in 2016.  He called her to say he was coming to Flint and wanted to meet her. Her actions have spearheaded a charity movement that donates school backpacks to area students.

Recently in North Carolina, high school senior David Ledbetter, founder of a local organization, Imagine This, handed out sample ballots and voter registration forms to people standing in line outside a Charlotte Popeye, making national news.

Whether advocates, activists, entrepreneurs, scientists or community organizers, these children and young adults are seizing the moment, acting to save their communities, their countries and the planet. Their energy, intelligence, and compassion give us hope for the future. We need to acknowledge them as emerging adults who will lead us before long, to thank them, and to keep on an eye on them, and what they can teach us.

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A Time to Mourn, A Time to March

In 1969, the largest antiwar protest in the United States took place in Washington, D.C. when an estimated half a million people gathered in the nation’s capital to plead for an end to the Vietnam War.  Demonstrations were held in other cities and towns across the country in the months that followed. I was at the one in New York City, where so many people participated it was impossible to duck into a storefront for relief from the crush of people who’d had enough. It was an amazing way to experience people power up close.

America has a long record of marches that changed history. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s African Americans, joined by many white activists, mobilized for a difficult and unprecedented journey to equality and human rights that continues today. It started with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a while man and was followed by several marches and other actions, culminating with the 1963 March on Washington. That was the largest political rally for human rights ever seen in the U.S. with approximately 300,000 people converging on the Mall to protest for African Americans’ freedom. It was there that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The event led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Five years later, the Poor People’s Campaign, a multicultural movement, led to Resurrection City where tents were set up along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. A major march occurred there called a Solidarity Day Rally for Jobs, Peace, and Freedom. It happened on June 19, 1968.

At about this time the women’s movement was coalescing and mobilizing to act for women’s rights and full equality, as their foremothers had done for the right to vote.  The suffragettes had stopped at nothing, suffering forced feedings and other brutality in jail. It paid off when the 19th amendment was passed by Congress in 1919, a 100th anniversary being observed as I write.

Fifty years later activists organized a Women’s Strike for Equality in New York. Over 50,000 women attended and over 100,000 demonstrated in solidarity in 42 states. Later, marches on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment began – and continued across the country. (Congress still has not ratified the ERA, but we’re getting close.)

After the ERA, women marched again for abortion rights and reproductive health and privacy with massive demonstrations taking place in Washington in 1986 and 1989. I was there in 1989 as an activist and journalist, proud to join the crowds that equaled or surpassed protest marches that had taken place against the Vietnam War. Then, of course, came January 21, 2017, when hundreds of thousands of women gathered in Washington after Donald Trump became president.

Today, people in places as diverse as Romania, Venezuela, and Hong Kong are marching against their governments to demand equality, freedom, justice and human rights. Representing all ages, genders, abilities and classes, and defying everything from bad weather to police brutality they are fighting together against corruption, greed, and autocracy.

The common denominator in all these historical moments and current events is that people have gathered together to mourn what they were losing, or never had, and then they marched.  They took to the streets and marched in solidarity until governments listened and they changed history – sometimes incrementally but always dramatically.

I wonder why that isn’t happening now, here, again.  Why aren’t Americans, the majority of whom dislike or despise what the Trump administration has wrought, and robbed us of, mobilized like we once were around monumental issues and threats to our security and wellbeing? Why is our collective outrage not on display in such powerful ways that there is no ignoring our refusal to collude?

When children are ripped from their parents and caged in cold jails indefinitely and made ill physically and emotionally; when youth are murdered because of their skin color, when adults die for lack of access to medical care, when gun violence takes innocent lives every day, when women have no control over their own bodies, when the president has a total lack of morality because of personal gain and massive ego, when we know he is guilty of violating the Constitution and of committing impeachable offenses, when he surrounds himself with unqualified and often cruel acolytes, what is keeping us from marching and marching and marching – and perhaps even camping out on the Mall indefinitely– in defense of democracy and human rights?

Why, I must ask, haven’t we called for and enacted a National Day of Mourning, and Marching?

As one activist of the 1980s put it, “No matter what they are called, perhaps the single most powerful, peaceful way to bring about social chance is for people to stand together publicly on behalf of an important cause.”  In a more current context, that’s what protesters in Hong Kong did As one of them noted recently, “All we can do as citizens is keep going, protest peacefully and let the government and regime know our demands.”

Are we ready, America?

The Global Problem of Child Marriage

Imagine being 23-years old and a promising science student studying on scholarship in England. Then imagine that having lived in the UK for half your life you are being forced by the government to return to your country of origin because your father demands that you marry your older cousin. Imagine that if you refuse, you will likely be killed.

That is the horrific story unfolding today about an aspiring astrophysicist whose identity is being protected by The Independent, which told her story last month. It’s a story that is repeated regularly for countless women in many countries who have no place to run. In this case, officials in England claim there is insufficient evidence that this young woman is at risk, despite the fact that she has reported frequent physical and mental abuse by her father and asserted that she and her siblings along with their mother fled to the UK. Her story should not be unbelievable; one in five murders in her native Pakistan are attributed to honor killings committed by fathers and brothers.

Now imagine that you have been betrothed at the age of eight, and then married off to your abusive first cousin, aged 34, at the age of 13. That’s what happened to Naila Amin in New York state and it was completely legal. Today Naila, who runs the foundation that bears her name, fights to ban child marriages in New York, which often occur because of loopholes and exceptions in the law.

According to a report earlier this year by the Associated Press, the U.S. has approved thousands of requests by men to bring child adolescent brides into the country. The approvals are legal because the Immigration and Nationality Act doesn’t set minimum age requirements. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services goes by whether the marriage is legal in the home country and whether the marriage is legal in the state where the petitioner lives. Naila Amin, like the astrophysicist, was from Pakistan, and a victim of that system.

According to a UNICEF report, worldwide there are more than 700 million women alive today who were married before their 18th birthday. More than a third of them were married before the age of fifteen. USAID claims that in the developing world one in three girls are married before age eighteen. Some are as young as eight or nine years old.

The minimum age for marriage in most U.S. states is eighteen. But every state has exceptions, including “parental consent” and judicial approval. The founder of the nonprofit organization Unchained at Last, herself a child marriage victim, told the New York Times, “Shockingly, 91 percent of children married in New Jersey were [found to have been] married to older adults [in a study she conducted], often at ages or with age differences that could have triggered statutory rape charges, not a marriage license.”

The Tahirih Justice Center, a national organization that protects immigrant women and girls who find themselves in the United States in arranged and abusive marriages, provides legal services and advocacy in courts, communities and Congress. It points out that “there are very few laws and policies in the U.S. that are specifically designed to help forced marriage victims.”

The District of Columbia and some states have statutes that criminalize forcing someone into marriage in “certain circumstances” the center says, but “these laws seem designed for other purposes than to prevent parents from forcing marriage or to punish them for forcing their children into marriage. The majority of state criminal statutes arise in the context of laws against abduction, prostitution, and/or ‘defilement.’”

Unchained at Last estimates that “given the size of the various communities in the U.S. that are known to practice arranged or forced marriages, which include Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, Sikh, Asian, African, Hmong and other communities, hundreds of thousands of women and girls in the U.S. are in arranged/forced marriages.”

The story of a woman named Syeda puts a human face on the plight of immigrant women in forced marriages living in the United States. Forced into marriage in Pakistan at the age of sixteen, she first lived with her parents while continuing her studies.  When she was twenty-five her family moved to Boston. Her husband joined her there, moving in with her family. She was immediately subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse which she endured for months until her family threw her out of the house because she refused to return to Pakistan with her husband. Syeda fled to a women’s shelter and has since taken control of her life. She has earned a college degree, has a job and lives independently. With the help of Unchained she is getting a divorce.

Syeda was lucky. But for thousands more children, here and abroad, the nightmare of forced or arranged marriage continues. Clearly, states need to step up their efforts to save these children. All of us need to realize what is happening to them, and to advocate on their behalf.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.

America Faces an Uncertain Future. Why is it Happening?

Having Donald Trump militarize America’s Independence Day, subjecting children and adults to, yes, concentration camps, and defy the courts are not events that can be easily ignored or overlooked.

However, firing climate change scientists or banning them to a Midwest gulag is a lot easier. So is rescinding food and drug safety regulations, rolling back health care protections for LGBTQ patients, foreclosing on working home owners, destroying public education, and compromising the country’s air, water, and wildlife.

There’s more, and it signals the Trump Administration’s dangerous, pro-profit, white supremacist politics, disrespect for the rule of law and the Constitution, and contempt for human rights.  Every day we draw closer to full-fledged fascism while the Democrats diddle, and most mainstream and cable media regurgitate premature political polling while allowing Trump to suck the oxygen out of the air waves.

Collective fatigue and self-preserving denial are understandable, but it’s time every one of us took serious notice of what is happening because a dangerously demented authoritarian, voted into office  - just as Adolf Hitler was - is getting away with murder (literally if you count the dead immigrants at the border) and no one seems able to stop him – not Congress, not the courts, and not the Constitution.

When I first considered writing this commentary, I thought about all the departmental travesties taking place, most without much notice. I began doing research, department by governmental department and that’s how I came upon troubling information at numerous government agencies. Here are just a few examples.

Thanks to an expose by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, I learned that a number of specialists working within a scientific group advising government for nearly sixty years on various issues, including defense and most recently climate change, were being fired. Scientists working on Department of Agriculture issues were given a month’s notice to decide if they would move their families to Kansas – where no facility for them to continue their work exists, or be fired. A short reprieve was issued for scientists working at the Department of Energy so that studies underway could conclude, but the future of the group’s 65 impressive scientists is unclear, even as it diversifies its client base. As the Washington Post pointed out, “Research is being decimated by the Trump team, especially when it comes to climate science and other research that doesn’t comport with the Trump agenda.”

Thanks also go to Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) who called out Ben Carson for failing America’s working families at HUD.  Interviewed by NBC after her tough grilling of Carson in a Congressional committee hearing, Porter said, “I wanted to engage Carson on the critical issue [of foreclosures] but what I got was evasion. Carson’s two-plus years as the leader of HUD have been marked by failure after failure to do right by this country’s working families.” Porter continued, exposing Carson’s total lack of awareness of his agency’s jurisdiction, his claim that “poverty to a large extent is a state of mind,” and his proposal to to slash HUD’s budget.

The National Education Association exposed the horrific record of Betsy De Vos at the Department of Education, where promoting education privatization is a top priority while serving special needs and trans children is being rolled back. DeVos also wants to repeal federal protections that hold predatory for-profit colleges accountable, to rescind sexual assault guidelines, and to put guns in schools.

National Geographic posted “15 Ways the Trump Administration has changed environmental policies,” while The Guardian wrote about the “nosedive” the FDA is taking in warning people about food and drug regulations not being enforced, and Politico revealed how the Trump administration is rolling back health care protections for LGBTQ patients.

The more I learned, the more I realized how much is happening “under the radar” – an expression that sounded familiar. Looking back on my commentary topics over the last 18 months, I realized that I had twice written pieces with that phrase in the title. That made me question not what was happening, but why it was happening.

Here are a few possibilities. One is that many in the Fourth Estate are largely failing to demand and drive accountability. Given that the courts, federal and Supreme, are being stacked against democracy and sound Constitutional interpretation, it is urgent that media editors and producers “call a thing [like racism] a thing.” That means not normalizing a dangerously delusional president or treating him like an ordinary candidate in next year’s election.  It means asking tough questions and demanding answers. It means putting priority issues over advertisers.

Further, the Democratic Party must realize this is no time to pussyfoot. Its strong suite is plurality which must not become its pitfall.  Democrats need to unify, fight, respect boundaries, message wisely, and start saving America. Equally, entities and individuals inside and out of government must vociferously say “No!” when Trump breaks rules, bullies, and acts crazy.

Americans, no matter how tired or disillusioned, must demand leadership that recognizes the slippery slope of looming dark days -- because it’s not only about the economy, jobs and healthcare. It’s about our future and our survival as a democratic beacon to the world.

Perhaps yesterday may have been too early to act, but surely tomorrow will be too late.

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Women Pay the Price in More Ways Than One

It isn’t just the crisis surrounding Draconian measures aimed at controlling our reproductive health, privacy, autonomy, and indeed our lives, that threatens women everywhere. Globally, women continue paying the price of hideous policies and actions devised and implemented by dictatorial men, whose devaluation of women and the human rights for which they advocate, is stunning.

The injury to women activists in a great many countries is often invisible, especially outside their own nations, despite torture, imprisonment, and death. Women suffer atrocities simply because they have had the courage to confront injustices perpetrated by powerful men threatened by women’s voices and acts.  These women need to be recognized and honored for their bravery and sacrifice.

Among them is Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, recently sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. Sotoudeh has advocated on behalf of Iranian women prosecuted for removing their hijabs in public. In 2010, she was convicted of conspiring to harm state security and served half of a six-year sentence. Last June she was rearrested on an array of dubious charges and tried in secret. Charged with seven crimes and given the maximum sentence for all of them, with five additional years added from a 2016 conviction in absentia, the sentence was severe even by Iranian standards.

More recently, Mena Mangal, an Afghan journalist, was killed on her way to work in Kabul because of her work on behalf of women’s rights, and in May a promising Russian feminist journalist, Margarita Virova, 25, died after “falling” from an eighth-floor apartment window which Moscow Times reported as not suspicious.

After the Saudi Arabian government jailed several prominent female activists, many of whom had fought for women’s right to drive, media reports revealed that the incarcerated women had been subjected to torture, including electrocution and flogging, as well as sexual abuse in detention. One woman was made to hang from the ceiling. Another tried to commit suicide.

Joining Saudi Arabia, Sudan has threatened the death penalty against women who resist their own oppression. Last year, Sudanese prosecutors sought the death penalty for Noura Hussein, a teenager in a forced marriage who killed her abusive husband after multiple rapes. Saudi Arabia wants to execute Israa al-Ghomgham, an activist who sought equal rights for Shiite Muslims.

In Iran, Atena Daemi, a human rights activist, has been targeted by authorities for her anti-death penalty position. First arrested in 2014, she is currently serving a seven-year sentence for criticizing executions and human rights violations on social media.

There are many more stories of women who survive the discrimination and violence they live with daily because of their activism. But many women do not survive. Among them was Mariello Franco, a leading voice for poor people living in Rio de Janeiro before she died at the age of 38. Gay and black, she was serving a term on the city council when she and her driver were killed. No arrests were ever made.

Elisa Badayos, a human rights activist who worked on behalf of poor people in Cebu, Philippines trying to find disappeared family members, was murdered along with two colleagues in 2017. She is survived by four children. Again, no arrests were made.

Guadalupe Campanur Tapia, a Mexican activist who worked on environmental issues and the rights of indigenous people, was 32-years old when her body was found on the roadside. In a similar story, Juana Raymundo, a 25-year old Guatemalan nurse who also worked for indigenous rights was tortured before being murdered.

In Iraq, Su’ad al-Ali, president of a human rights organization focused on women and children, was leading a protest in Basra focusing on rising unemployment and corruption when she was shot in the head getting into her car. She was 46 and left behind four young children.

And who can forget the image of Razan al-Najjar, 21, the Palestinian volunteer medic in white shot dead last June when she ran toward a border fence in Gaza to help an injured person? Her last Facebook post read, “I am returning and not retreating.  Hit me with your bullets, I am not afraid.”

All these remembrances represent only a few of the tragic stories of women around the world who have been grievously harmed, or have given their lives, in the name of human rights and social justice. It is good and necessary to honor them and their sacrifices on behalf of multitudes of others.

But it is not enough. It is not enough to lay wreathes on their graves, or to say their names. It is not enough to allow such extraordinary women to remain invisible. It is not enough when the world continues to ignore the issues for which they fought. It is not enough, so long as men still have sufficient power to harm women and girls and to withhold from them their human rights. It is not enough when men can continue to harness female energy and action and silence female voices. It is not enough when men decide who among them shall live and who shall die. It will never be enough until every woman everywhere has the guaranteed right to decide her own course and to live her life freely and unafraid.

Why Harriet Tubman Belongs on the $20 Bill

The lengths this administration will go to in order to erase decisions made by the Obama administration or insult Blacks while signaling white supremacists are nothing short of stunning.

Those can be the only reasons that Treasury Secretary Steven Minuchin announced to a House Financial Services Committee meeting in May that the Obama administration’s 2016 decision to substitute Harriet Tubman for Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill would “not be an issue that comes up until most likely 2026.”

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the U.S. who was elected in 1828, owned about 300 slaves. He is connected to the Trail of Tears, the forced relocations of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas usually west of the Mississippi River designated as Indian Territory. He was impeached for attempting to dismiss his Secretary of War, narrowly escaping conviction by the Senate.  Ironically, he opposed both the idea of a National Bank and paper money, yet his face still appears on America’s currency.

Compare Jackson to Harriet Tubman, the extraordinary woman who was born a slave and became the abolitionist and activist most well known for rescuing slaves, family and friends via at least a dozen trips on the network of safe houses known as the “Underground Railroad.”

Tubman, born into slavery in Maryland in 1820 or 1821, once said of her own journey to freedom, “I had crossed the line, I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.”  But she saw to it that others, whose tears she had seen and whose sighs and groans she had heard, as she put it, found welcome on their difficult and dangerous journeys, because she had vowed to “give every drop in my veins to free them.”

In 1850, having escaped slavery, she returned to Maryland after learning that her niece was about to be auctioned off.  Leading her to safety, she went on to rescue more than 70 other slaves at that time, continuing her mercy missions until the Civil War broke out. She is thought to have saved as many as 3,000 slaves and she never failed in a single rescue, earning the name “Moses.”

Tubman, who was illiterate, often used disguises, sometimes pretending to read a newspaper or dressing like a field hand with chickens in tow. She also used spirituals and other songs as code for her followers. She managed to avoid police, dogs, mobs, and slave catchers, and often slept in swamps, moving on only at night. Known as the “black ghost,” the bounty on her head was about $12,000 or $330,000 in today’s terms.

During the Civil War she served as an army nurse on the Union side, and scouted or spied behind enemy lines. On one famous mission in South Carolina, she helped free 700 slaves in one go. Having worked for the army for three years, she applied for veteran’s compensation when the war ended. It took 34 years for her to get it after President Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward intervened. She was 78 years old at the time.

Although impoverished after the War, Tubman became active in the women’s suffrage movement, traveling to New York and Washington to give speeches despite having occasional seizures resulting from a childhood injury.  In the 1890s she underwent brain surgery to alleviate lifelong headaches, refusing anesthesia for the operation as she had seen soldiers do.

Harriet Tubman’s life came to an end in 1913 in Auburn, NY in a home for the aged that she had founded. She was 91 years old and was buried with military honors not far from the grave of William Seward. She had lived an amazing life, especially for an African American woman at that time.

This is the woman the Trump administration refuses to honor on the $20 bill.

New Yorker Dano Wall, an artist who's been working with 3D printers since 2012, has created a stamp that allows users to superimpose Tubman's face over Jackson's on the $20 note. Previously available online as an act of civil disobedience, it has quickly sold out since the delay was announced by Minuchin. Wall reported in May, shortly after the announcement, that he’d received over 2,000 requests for more stamps.  Apparently, the notes with the Tubman stamp have been used successfully in vending machines, although shops and banks may not recognize them as legal tender – yet.

Still, if $20 Tubman bills keep turning up, it’s enough to send a signal to the Treasury Department and the Oval Office. Who knows? It might even make the racist Andrew Jackson turn over in his grave. Holy Moses!

Missing in Action: Democrats, Media, Public

Following the debacle created by Attorney General William Barr when he decided unilaterally that Donald Trump wasn’t guilty of collusion or obstruction of justice, it seems appropriate to declare that we are facing dark times in America. It should be clear by now that we are experiencing an unprecedented, deeply dangerous Constitutional crisis that begs the question: Why aren’t Democrats, some media, and the public reacting more vigorously to the growing nightmare of encroaching autocracy, if not outright dictatorship?

Political pundits will continue to deconstruct what happened following the release of the Mueller report for some time. Ideas about what went wrong and why regarding the myriad illegalities rapidly turning us into a Banana Republic will, we hope, ultimately be revealed. I leave that discussion to others.

I am compelled instead to focus on damaging failures by a disturbing number of Democratic leaders, some seasoned media figures, and a somnolent public, who seem insufficiently concerned with the serious threat this country faces: The creeping death of our Republic, so carefully crafted on a a set of principles grounded in the highest ideals and structured in a way as to ensure their continuity.

Now, more than 200 years later, as we watch those principles and ideals being decimated and discarded, how can it be that – with so many canaries in the coalmine – about 40 percent of Americans appear to be inured to the dangers ahead as we face a Constitutional crisis of huge proportion. I repeat: A Constitutional, not a political, crisis that every sentient citizen ought to be deeply troubled by, and none more so than our elected officials.

And yet the speaker of the House of Representatives, and other Democrats, say that Donald Trump isn’t worth impeaching. Or that it’s too soon to impeach. Or that we need more solid evidence of the deep, pervasive culture of corruption this administration and this president have spawned.

I am reminded of the saying, “Today may be too soon, but tomorrow will surely be too late.” For while I understand the argument for taking the time to build a solid case for impeachment in the face of Republican’s incalcitrant political posturing and lack of moral or ethical behavior, I also worry that a duplicative, drawn out inquiry, and more dangerously, expecting voters to rid us of our present scourge at the polls next year is sheer folly. Too many voters don’t seem to understand what’s happening before their eyes and many of them have no interest in the Mueller report. They put Donald Trump in office – or at least the Electoral College did – and now they want to “move on,” while disinformation, voter disenfranchisement, and Russian hacking are likely to grow.

It bears repeating that this is not a political issue. It’s not even solely a moral or ethical issue. We are living through a failure of conscience, of intellect, and of will that every American needs to understand and face with the utmost consciousness. One need only remember the terrible travesties of this administration – the caging of children, the scapegoating of Muslims, the sanctioning of violence, hate crimes, and white supremacy, the vile utterings and copious lies of an ill-equipped and often cruel leader who reveres dictators, the injustices increasingly suffered by so many Americans, the rape of sacred lands and pollution of the environment, the dangerous rollbacks in regulation in the name of profit, the threat of nationalizing media and arresting journalists, and more.

Consider just this one fact:  The Justice Department has itself just obstructed justice. People can argue that we need to address “real issues,” like health care, jobs and the economy. I agree that the media has failed to expose numerous policy issues we face while allowing Mr. Trump to suck all the oxygen out of the air waves. But none of these things will ever be attended to if we don’t recognize the urgency of defeating autocracy before it’s too late.

As for the canaries in the coalmine, none is more prescient, it seems to me, than the deepening misogyny and racism we are witnessing. Where, for example, were the Democrats in Congress when Ilhan Omar was vilified because she is a woman, a person of color, and a Muslim? 

And surely the media, while drawing attention to dangerous Trumpian demagogues hell-bent on destroying our systems of governance, needs to cover more fairly the competent women running for president. Every one of us should be outraged by moves to marginalize, trivialize, and punish these extraordinary women. Such dismissal of women as potential candidates reveals the underbelly of countries dominated by patriarchal autocracies.

The late Norman Birnbaum, illustrious journalistic and scholar, noted that “Modern authoritarianism is not subtle, but it is omnipresent.” He also said “Avoidance, falsification, and trivialization mark our encounter with past and future.” He was right -- modern authoritarianism is staring us in the face.

Let’s hope, therefore, that Winston Churchill was also right. If we act wisely, this may not be “the beginning of the end.” With enough courage to impeach, perhaps it is “the end of the beginning.” A new beginning couldn’t be more timely or urgent.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, politics and social justice from Saxtons River, Vt.

Can We Get Israel's BDS Issue Straight Once and For All?

As an American Jew who supports Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) in response to Israel’s violence against and persecution of Palestinians, I was appalled to see a list of congress-people, especially Democrats, against the BDS movement. I understand their reluctance to go public on the issue – even those who actually agree with BDS - because they take large sums of money from individuals and lobbying organizations seeking their support of Israel, right or wrong.

However, the time has come to make clear to politicians and regular people alike that the BDS movement is aimed at stopping the Israeli policy of inhumane treatment of Palestinians. It is not an anti-Semitic point of view.  People like me support BDS as a movement because we are against Israeli policy – not against Jews or the right of a Jewish state to exist. 

Why, I wonder, is that distinction so difficult to grasp and elucidate? I’d like to have a dollar for every time I’ve been tagged an anti-Semite by friends and family because I criticize Israel’s policy – not Jews.

As a human being sickened by Israel’s apartheid policies, and yes, that’s what they are, policies that translate into violence against an entire people, I ask this: What if another country – say Germany – was doing to --say Jews – what Israel is doing to Palestinians? Would people shout terms like “anti-Semite” at those decrying cruelties against an ethnic group?

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., headlined by many in the media as a Muslim freshman in the House of Representatives, (emphasis mine) was pilloried when she spoke out as so many others have done, and was immediately tagged an “anti-Semite.”  I would argue that the attacks on her are not so much about anti-Semitism as they are about anti-Muslim sentiment.

Omar, as you will recall, used the term “Benjamins” in a tweet that set Twitter on fire. Let’s be clear: Ben Franklin’s picture appears on the US $100 bill. “Benjamins” was a term coined to refer to money, especially large amounts of it, as in “I’m broke! Can you lend me a Benjamin?” It was coopted to refer to Jews with money and has now become a trope to convey anti-Semitism. I wonder if Ilhan Omar even knew that.

In response to the accusations against Omar, Rashida Tlaib, the other Muslim woman elected to the House of Representatives, said, “This is the U.S. where boycotting is a right and part of our historical fight for freedom and equality.” The ACLU agrees. That’s why they are fighting against laws, already in place in many states, mandating state contractors to sign a pledge stating they don’t participate in boycotts of Israel or the settlements.

In Texas, several people including a school speech pathologist and a teacher have already lost their jobs.  It all smacks of McCarthyism, and violates the Constitution and its guarantee of the First Amendment right to free speech.

Let’s be very clear: As the Palestinian BDS National Committee puts it, The BDS movement is a global campaign promoting various forms of boycott against Israel until it meets what the campaign describes as “Israel’s “obligation under international law,” defined as withdrawal from the occupied territories, removal of the separation barrier in the West Bank, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and “respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties.” Nothing anti-Semitic about it.

Protests, conferences, and conversations in support of the campaign have taken place in numerous countries while support for the BDS movement grows. This movement is not run by anti-Semites, but by people of conscience representing all faiths, including a global coalition of 40 Jewish groups from 15 countries that has issued a statement condemning attempts to stifle criticism of Israel with false accusations of anti-Semitism.

In its 2017-18 “Report Freedom,” Amnesty International cited numerous violations of human rights currently being implemented in Israel. Among them are illegal air, land and sea blockades of the Gaza Strip, now in its 11th year, humanitarian crises resulting from reduced access to electricity, reductions in clean water and sanitation, diminished health services and more, making Gaza “unlivable” according to the United Nations.

In the West Bank, Palestinians are restricted in their movements by military checkpoints and firing zones and live in fear of collective punishment. The report documents arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, unlawful killings, excessive use of force, violence against women and girls, limitations on association and assembly, denial of refugees and asylum seekers, and punishment of conscientious objectors.

America stood by far too long as genocides occurred in countries all over the world, despite post-Holocaust pledges of “Never Again!” None of those events led to labeling meant to shame those who spoke out against such passivity.  Yet when it comes to Israel, the anti-Semitism charge is immediately invoked. It is the refuge of scoundrels. Among those scoundrels are politicians eager to accept money from those who remain willfully blind to Israeli atrocities.

It’s time that politicians and ordinary people alike stand up to Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing. It’s time to recognize what happens when people like Ilhan Omar, and me, speak out. It’s time to support BDS.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, politics, and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com 

Let's Be Clear About Third Trimester Abortion

As a longtime women’s health educator and advocate, I was apoplectic when I read a recent commentary in my local newspaper by a “chaplain serving an elderly population” who is also “treasurer of the Republican Party” in my state and a “county party chair.”

The op.ed. proffered so many spurious and false assertions, often stated by others with far-right political views, that my hair was nearly on fire. Given where we are in this country regarding abortion, I felt compelled to address one of the egregiously uninformed views of the author, which I did in a Letter to the Editor.  It seems to me now important to share what I wrote for a wider audience, in the hope of reaching others inclined to make uninformed claims about a vital issue that affects so many lives and the culture in which we live. 

This is the claim that blew me away. It relates to a bill in my state proposing a law like ones in some other states protecting a woman’s right to abortion moving forward. “The bill goes far beyond Roe [v. Wade], guaranteeing unrestricted abortion through all nine months of pregnancy…” the author wrote. It’s a misleading claim that calls for revisiting the facts regarding the inaccurate use of the term “late term abortion.”

The first thing to note here is that abortion after fetal viability is a rare occurrence and usually involves a medical crisis. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, abortions after 21 weeks make up less than 1.3% of all abortions in the United States. Abortions that occur beyond 24 weeks make up less than 1% of all procedures. Exceptionally rare cases that happen after 24 weeks are often because a fetus has a condition that cannot be treated and and that renders the fetus unable to survive, regardless of gestational age or trimester.

Secondly, the 14th amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees due process and equal protection under the law, was vital to the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. The 14th amendment also protects the right to privacy and the Court held that a woman's right to an abortion fell within that statute. By a 7–2 majority the Court ruled that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional. Importantly, the Court also determined the point of fetal viability as the “capability of meaningful life outside the mother's womb,” hence the 24- week marker. The Court’s decision gave women a right to abortion during the entirety of the pregnancy, however, while defining different levels of state interest for regulating abortion in the second and third trimesters.

It’s important to know that, as the Guttmacher Institute points out, if a physician determines that the child is “non-viable” and/or the abortion is necessary for the physical or mental health of the mother, a woman can have an abortion from the moment of conception until the child’s birth. State laws restricting third trimester abortions are unconstitutional under the precedent of Doe v. Bolton, a case in which the Supreme Court overturned a Georgia law. (Numerous states have laws that ban or restrict abortions in the third trimester. Because these statutes remain in place or haven’t been contested in federal court, they may imply that they are allowed by federal law. But because federal law trumps state law, no restrictions can be enacted that do not also allow the doctor to determine if abortion is necessary for the health of the mother.)

Here’s another fact: Overturning Roe and Doe won’t end all third-trimester abortions. When the Supreme Court throws the abortion issue back to individual states, third-trimester abortions will still be protected in states that reiterate prior standards for “viability” or “health.”

But here’s the most important thing for everyone to know. No woman decides to have an abortion after 24 weeks recklessly or without a great deal of anguish. Perhaps she does it because of a serious illness she has, like decompensating heart disease. Maybe her baby has a delayed diagnosis of anencephaly, which means the fetus forms without a complete brain or skull. There are a multitude of medical crises that can precipitate a third trimester abortion. But the decision is never taken lightly. In most cases, there is deep grieving and a profound sense of loss, brought about because of medical necessity and the wish that a much loved and wanted baby not suffer.

That’s why people like the man who wrote the troubling commentary – claiming that he “doesn’t oppose or seek to diminish women’s rights” and that he “supports [women’s] right to their own body and right to choose” -- people who misunderstand not just the right to abortion but the reasons women choose it, at any stage of pregnancy, must move beyond facile arguments, misstatements of fact, and feeble justifications. They must somehow begin to recognize that for many women, the choices they face are devastating and immensely complicated.  

Most urgently, they must find it in themselves to be compassionate and to resist judging those whose experiences and viewpoints differ from theirs. 

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, politics, and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

Why Are So Many Native American Women Abused, Missing and Murdered?

Savanna Greywind was a young woman in Fargo, North Dakota about to give birth in a few weeks when she was brutally murdered. Leona LeClair Kinsey was an older woman living in Oregon when she went missing eighteen years ago. She is still missing. RoyLynn Rides Horse, a Crow tribal member, died in 2016 after being beaten, burned, and left in a field to die.

These stories are all too common, but statistics about how pervasive the problem is are hard to find. Many cases go unreported, others aren’t well documented, and no centralized database exists in the U.S. government to track cases.

 According to the Indian Law Resource Center, violence against indigenous women in the U.S. has reached unprecedented levels on tribal lands and in Alaska Native villages. More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and more than 1 in 2 have experienced sexual violence. Alaska Native women have reported rates of domestic violence up to 10 times higher than in the rest of the United States. On some reservations, indigenous women are murdered at more than ten times the national average.

“You really have to contact tribe by tribe, family by family, to really see the true impact,” one advocate says. “We are shoved under the rug by corruption even in our own homelands,” says another. “I’m here to say we will not be shoved under the rug anymore.”

At the heart of the problem is the longstanding indifference and hostility to Native Americans, especially Native American women, which can be traced back to the days when separating Native people from their families and homes and denying them their culture was a deliberate attempt to destroy Native beliefs, ways of life, even people.

Continuing racism and sexism contribute to the impression that indigenous women are assailable, says Barbara Perry, a profess at the University of Ontario. “It’s not unusual for women of color generally to be perceived as inferior to white people as a class and inferior white women as a subclass.”

The effects of these travesties remain present in unique ways for Native women. In addition to suffering sex trafficking, sexual violence, and the risk of being disappeared, they are often homeless, living in dire poverty, and totally disconnected from their families and communities.  

Now they face a new vulnerability from the flood of non-native workers into oil-rich regions or near reservations. Of particular concern is the workers who will lay the Keystone XL pipeline running from Canada through Montana, Illinois, and Texas, bringing many more workers into the “man camps” being built along the way. The problems that these camps bring is particularly acute in a region stretching across 200,000 square miles along the Montana-North Dakota state line. Attacks there on Native American women have increased dramatically as tens of thousands of transient oil workers have inhabited the temporary housing known as man camps.

Tribal law enforcement has no jurisdiction over non-native men who assault Native American women on reservations, according to Cheryl Bennet, an Arizona State University professor. “If a white person commits murder or rape against a Native American person, the federal government would have jurisdiction over those crimes instead of the tribe or state government.” But when tribal law enforcement sent sexual abuse cases to the FBI and U.S. Attorney Offices, federal prosecutors declined more than two-thirds of the cases, according to a 2010 Government Accountability Office report.

In recent months, the plight of Native women has begun receiving attention thanks to a growing activist movement that is being heard in state capitals and on Capitol Hill. Last year Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), defeated in the November mid-term election, introduced a bill to standardize law enforcement protocols relating to missing and murdered Native Americans. It attracted sixteen co-sponsors but didn’t make it out of committee.  

At the state level, Republican Rep. Gina McCabe introduced a House bill in Washington State that would bring the federal, state, and federally recognized sovereign tribal governments together to ensure that everyone in the state who goes missing is reported and listed in a central location. The bill, now making its way through the legislative process, mandates that the State Patrol creates a list of missing Native American women in Washington by June this year, working together with tribal and non-tribal police agencies.

May 5, 2017 marked the first National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls. Twelve years earlier, the movement for the safety of Native women, largely spearheaded by the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC) and other groups, had led the struggle to include a separate title for Native women, called Safety for Indian Women, in the Violence Against Women Act. It was a start in raising awareness of this national issue but much more needs to be done.

More than half of Native American women have been sexually assaulted, including over a third who have been raped during their lifetime. That rate is nearly two-and-a-half times higher than for white women, according to a 2016 National Institute of Justice study.

As the NIWRC said at the first National Day of Awareness, “Before this crisis is sufficiently addressed, it must first be acknowledged.”

That means by all of us.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.www.elayne-clift.com

Women vs. Fetus: Is Social Control Out of Control?

Not long ago, a woman in late pregnancy suffering severe depression tried to commit suicide. She survived but her baby died. She was charged with murder. A pregnant woman who lost her unborn child in a car accident in New York state was charged with manslaughter. So was a woman in Indiana who gave birth to a stillborn baby.

Even in cases where a fetus hasn’t died, pregnant women have been charged with crimes in various states – for miscarrying, falling down the stairs, failing a drug test, or taking legal drugs during pregnancy, often prescribed by doctors.

These examples, reported in a recent New York Times series exploring “legislative intrusions into the womb,” reveal a paternalism that is not new, but is alarming, and growing in the Trump era. They are also reminiscent of other frightening autocratic and dictatorial eras. Hitler, for example, “recruited” German women to produce Aryan children. Under the Romanian dictator Ceaușescu, assassinated in 1989, women were subjected to monthly pelvic exams in their workplaces while high school girls were routinely digitally raped by male doctors to ensure that all pregnancies were carried to term. In The Handmaid’s Tale, resurrected in the face of Trumpian resistance to reproductive freedom, forced insemination of those selected to be Mothers is assisted by designated Wives.

If all of this is disgusting to imagine it should be because it derives from a vile act of social control. Such control, still relatively rare but growing, is already occurring in America.

Here’s just one example.  Politicians in Ohio recently considered a bill that could have allowed abortions to be punishable with life sentences or the death penalty. The proposed law, would have extended the definition of a person in Ohio's criminal code to include the "unborn human." That meant that a fetus, from conception to birth, would be considered a person, leaving people who perform abortions or women who have them vulnerable to severe criminal penalties.

According to the ACLU, at least 38 states have fetal homicide laws, most of which relate to fetuses killed by violent acts against pregnant women. So-called pro-life advocates use laws like the Fetal Protection Act, the Preborn Victims of Violence Act and the Unborn Victim of Violence Act to argue that fetuses are persons, or “a child in uterus,” and need to be protected in all circumstances.

The ACLU argues that “a pregnant woman and her fetus should never be regarded as separate, independent, and even adversarial, entities. Yet that is precisely what some anti-choice organizations, legal theorists, legislators, prosecutors, doctors and courts have attempted to do in the past decade.”

Legislation designed to protect fetuses can take different forms, the ACLU points out. All of them endanger reproductive rights. States may amend existing homicide statutes to include fetuses as victims, they can pass statutes defining a fetus as a person, or establish a new crime category called “feticide” or fetal homicide. They can also permit civil suits against anyone who causes the death of a fetus, or enact new statutes to penalize injury to a pregnant woman that causes fetal death or injury. This law is aimed primarily at practitioners, which flies in the face of the constitutional right to choose, established by Roe v. Wade, which calls for abortion to be exempt from punishment when performed by “health care workers with the consent of the woman or in medical emergencies, and self-abortions.”

Clearly, fetal protection legislation fosters the policing of pregnancy, just as it did in Romania. It makes it more likely that practitioners will become overzealous, thereby complicating routine healthcare decisions. In Florida, for example, a woman was told by her doctor that he would send law enforcement to her home if she didn’t get to the hospital immediately for a C-section. A New Jersey mother lost custody of her newborn after refusing a surgical delivery.

All of this raises the larger, deeply troubling issue of social control, which usually comes at the expense of women. Writing in The Atlantic’s latest issue, editor Peter Beinart sounds this alarm: “Authoritarian nationalism is rising in a diverse set of countries [for various reasons, but] right-wing autocrats taking power across the world share one big thing, which often goes unrecognized in the U.S.: They all want to subordinate women.”

The question is why, and Valerie M. Hudson, a political scientist at Texas A&M, has this answer: “It’s vital to remember that for most of human history, leaders and their male subjects forged a social contract: ‘Men agreed to be ruled by other men in return for all men ruling over women.’ This political hierarchy appeared natural—as natural as adults ruling children—because it mirrored the hierarchy of the home. Thus, for millennia, men, and many women, have associated male dominance with political legitimacy. Women’s empowerment ruptures this order.”

In other words, keeping women “barefoot and pregnant” is essential to patriarchy. Autonomous women liberated from childbearing, empowered with reproductive choice, unleashed into the marketplace, the academy, and government threaten male power. That reality has played out in various forms throughout history.

Seeing it happen in the 21st century is unacceptable.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

Is It Really Silly Season So Soon?

January 1, 2019 and the horses were out of the gate, their hoofbeats assaulting our already over-taxed patience. The political horseplay began with a vengeance - before the new Congress set foot in Washington and before anyone had formally declared they were running for President next year. The new year promised the American public, and the world, a long and rocky race as all eyes, arguments, and predictions focused on the 2020 election.

Some pundits say the palaver is right on time. But most of us would probably concur that it’s way too early to begin the non-stop spewing and sputtering when we don’t even know who the serious contenders will be, or what they have to offer.

Still, the mainstream media dug in its heels and to the exclusion of reporting real and urgent news, they started having a field day. The New York Times, for example, ran a piece with this over-written, somewhat hysterical headline: "Rashida Tlaib’s Expletive-Laden Cry to Impeach Trump Upends Democrats’ Talking Points"!  "Expletive-Laden Cry"? She said one bad word at a private event and got caught on tape. The M-F- word, it seems, is enough to ruin a woman’s budding political career, but a guy who says publicly that he likes to “grab pussy” gets a pass and becomes president?

Dancing while Female?  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez danced, beautifully and joyfully, while in college, mimicking a famous movie dance scene. Someone taped it. A right-winger posted it, and hey presto, she's the bad "little girl."  

Elizabeth Warren went public first and she's immediately "unlikable." Sound familiar? Not only was Hillary Rodham Clinton tagged “unlikeable,” her headbands and hairstyles were scrutinized ad nauseam, as was Michelle Obama’s choice of sleeveless dresses, now the norm in women’s fashion.

Common denominator? Fear of powerful women, i.e., misogyny, and it needs to be called out every single time it rears its ugly head, whether in Congress, in conversation, or by TV pundits, social and print media, among the worst offenders for stoking this kind of sexist nonsense. Women like Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters know that game when they see it, and they aren't afraid to confront it, making them superb role models.

Moving on, how fair is it to be polling for favorite 2020 candidates and reporting on outcomes when most potential candidates have not yet declared? How in the world can anyone know who they are inclined to vote for until they hear what frontrunners have to say, never mind time to scrutinize their experience and policy perspectives?

It was nothing short of shocking to hear potential candidate Terry McAuliffe, former governor of Virginia, do a self-serving pre-stump speech critical of the progressive agenda of the Democratic party’s left in which he revealed how out of touch he is with what just happened in the mid-term election. Similarly, California Senator Dianne Feinstein didn’t get what the Blue/Pink Wave was all about. With all due respect to Joe Biden, Sen. Feinstein, and Mr. McAuliffe, the election was not about same old white guy-driven policies and agendas that don't speak to the new generation of Democratic constituencies. It was about inclusivity, relevance, and effectiveness in a 21st century political world.

That world is culturally, ethnically, and economically diverse, moving toward progressive ideas and goals, deeply committed to social justice, the earth’s survival, a democratic future, and other critical issues of our time. People like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke and others deserve their chance as McAuliffe, Feinstein and Biden have had theirs.

Messages about economic gains for the middle class (which means mostly white people) no longer resonate at a time when the U.S. government is caging and killing kids, when our water and food is no longer safe and children are dying because of rolled back regulations, when adults and seniors are dying prematurely because they can’t afford their medicines (like insulin) and can’t access health care, when Americans can’t earn a living wage, when people get killed just for being black and hate crimes are on the rise, when the planet we share is in real danger of dying, when ethical and moral behavior in Congressional offices and chambers no longer exists, and when we are on the brink of serious disasters, man-made and natural, with no one at the helm or in government agencies who understands or cares so long as their coffers are full.

This is not a time to be politically regressive. Our full attention, our intellectual faculties, our conscience and compassion have never been more important or more necessary. They must be exercised by each of us to the fullest degree if we are to survive as a nation and as citizens of a morally and physically safe world.

Everyone must commit to that effort, including those who have served as our political voice in the past, and those who want to find their way and use their voices to offer appropriate legislation and new, important ideas, knowing that they will be heard and that their ideas will be considered carefully, not judged on what they say privately, what they wear, or how they dance.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics, and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.

www.elayne-clift.com

Will Artificial Intelligence Put an End to Real People?

Okay, I confess. Sorry, Siri, but I find you and Alexa creepy. I worry that native intelligence is being replaced by “artificial intelligence,” which strikes me as a modern-day oxymoron, like “virtual reality.” I’m scared about what’s coming as technology takes over our lives. And I’m nearly convinced robots are going to make humans unnecessary if not extinct. Call me crazy, but that’s what they called Jules Verne too.

It seems I’m in good company. Some pretty big names in science and technology have also expressed concern about the inherent risks AI could pose. They include the late physicist Stephen Hawking who told the BBC several years ago that, "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Elon Musk, engineer and head of Tesla, has said that autonomous machines could unleash “weapons of terror,” comparing the adoption of AI to “summoning the devil.” And Bill Gates is worried that AI is only viable if we make sure humans remain in control of machines.

As one techie posted on Tech Times.com, what happens if Siri decides that she wants to take over the world? He didn’t seem to think that was a real threat, but what if AI becomes so advanced that it decides it wants power of its own? Others worry that if artificially intelligent systems misunderstand a mission they’re given, they could cause more damage than good and end up hurting lots of people.

A lot of folks are worried about the implications of AI-controlled weapons. They might be able to help soldiers and civilians in war zones, but they could also cause a global arms race that could end up being disastrous.  According to a scientist at the Future of Life Institute, “There is an appreciable probability that the course of human history over the next century will be dramatically affected by how AI is developed. It would be extremely unwise to leave this to chance,” he argues.

There are also troubling ways in which AI could infringe upon our personal privacy. Facebook’s recent problems have already demonstrated some of the possibilities, from unwanted intrusion to exposure that leaves us vulnerable. Facebook can already recognize someone by the clothes they wear, the books they read, and the movies they watch. What happens when government agencies have fully developed recognition systems?

In one alarming thesis put forward by Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher, artificial intelligence may prove to be apocalyptic. He thinks AI “could effortlessly enslave or destroy Homo sapiens if they so wished.”

No longer the stuff of science fiction, many AI milestones have already been reached even thought experts thought it would take decades to get where we are now in terms of relevant technology. While some scientists think it will take a long time to develop human-level AI or superintelligence, others at a 2015 conference thought it would happen within the next forty years or so. Given AI’s potential to exceed human intelligence, we really don’t know how it will behave.  If humans are no longer the smartest beings on earth, how do we get to stay in control?

A recent, lengthy article about “Superior Intelligence” in The New Yorker, pointed out that imbuing AI with higher intelligence than humans have risks having robots turn against us. “Intelligence and power seek their own increase,” Tad Friendly posited in his piece. “Once an AI surpasses us, there’s no reason to believe it will feel grateful to us for inventing it, particularly if we haven’t figured out how to imbue it with empathy.”

Here’s another interesting thing to contemplate. In 1988, Friendly shares, “roboticist Hans Moravec observed that tasks we find difficult are child’s play for a computer, and vice versa. ‘It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance in solving problems on intelligence tests, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.’”

And here’s a scary thought: According to The New Yorker, Vladimir Putin told Russian schoolchildren not long ago that “the future belongs to artificial intelligence. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”  In light of recent interference with western elections, one must wonder what he’s got in the way of AI technology (or whether he has already found a way to infiltrate Donald Trump’s brain and program his mouth.)

I realize I may be getting ahead of things and sounding unduly alarmist, but it’s all pretty scary stuff. I hope the day never comes when people younger than I am have to admit that, along with Stephen Hawking et. al., I was not totally out in left field. Worse still, I hope they never have to dodge incoming missiles directed by maniacal robots angry because we didn’t make them even smarter and more powerful than they already are.    

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Elayne writes and worries from Saxtons River, Vt.

Beginning the New Year, Eyes Wide Open

“People are slow to recognize events taking place around them. They have other priorities, events happen invisibly, changes are incremental, people keep recalibrating.”

That quote, from an article in the November issue of Smithsonian Magazine, appears in the introduction to a story of a young Jewish girl’s diary written during WWII and only recently discovered.  Her name was Renia Spiegel and she was murdered by Nazis when she was 18.

The quote jumped out at me because as 2018 was coming to a close I found myself increasingly concerned about the precipice we seem to be facing as American democracy steals ever closer to dangerous and perhaps irrevocable decline. The rapidity with which we are descending into unprecedented political depravity was alarming in itself, but so too was the fact that so many people didn’t appear to understand what was happening, or didn’t seem to care.

One can perhaps understand the lack of gravity among people too young to remember the terror of 1930s Europe or our own crisis of the 1960s and the Nixonian blight, but how, I wondered, could the worries of the present, and the warnings from those who witnessed WWII through the lens of global aggression, hatred, prejudice, and violence not be taken more seriously?

We are not, of course, the only country flirting with or openly embracing fascism. Almost all of Europe is now threatened with reprisal of a time, and a scourge, we thought impossible to repeat when the war ended. Many other regions of the world from South America to the Philippines are also facing threats, or the reality, of dictatorship. It’s a situation we all need to be aware of and to resist mightily. After all, to where does one flee when the majority of nations have succumbed?

But our country has other trouble signs that don’t exist elsewhere and they need attention and action too.

We are virtually the only “developed” nation in the world that has chosen to ignore the visible, verifiable science of climate change.

We are a country unable to enact gun laws that could keep our children from being murdered.

We are a country in which white men, like outrageous sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, or crime partner Michael Cohen, can negotiate their way out of appropriate jail time despite serious crimes they’ve committed, while black men caught with a bit of marijuana in their possession a decade or two ago languish in jail, and women like Cyntoia Brown, a victim of sex abuse and trafficking who killed her 43-year old abuser when she was 16, gets a life sentence with a 50-year wait for possibility of parole. 

We are a country that lets people die for lack of access to massively expensive healthcare, a country that stands by as our sacred lands and national parks are drilled, fracked, and mined, our water is polluted, and our kids can’t get a decent meal in school, which for many is their only solid meal a day.

We are a country in which decent people seeking safety and the dignity of work are torn from their children and an agency like ICE can detain and deport them at will while holding their kids hostage in cages and desert jails.

We are a country (although not the only one) where hate crimes and violent rhetoric and behavior have escalated dramatically in the last year, and where anyone perceived as Other is fair game for such crime and violence.

And we are a country where legislators try their damnedest to forbid women control over their bodies and agency over their lives.

It’s enough to take anyone’s breathe away and it makes it really hard to “go high,” as Michele Obama would say, because there seems to be no end to how low people who have no business in government are willing to go.

For two years I clung to the idea that surely, this event or that would be the one to end the dysfunction, cruelty, corruption, lying and various abuses we were experiencing and witnessing. I’ve tried to offer optimism and hope to people as their (and my own) angst has grown. And as 2018 faded, there were signs that we might see an end to the travesties engulfing us. The courts were holding, journalists were doing extraordinary investigative research while media was finding its voice when feet needed to be held to fire, and Robert Mueller was closing in. And that big blue, female wave in Congress and down-ballot was, I believe, a foreshadowing of the change that is possible, and I think inevitable – so long as we maintain vigilant and vocal.

All of that is encouraging. But there is still a tsunami coming toward us and the clock is ticking. The moment when it will be too late to hide or run get to higher ground is nearly upon us. So, while we cling to hope and optimism, we must never allow ourselves to let other priorities prevail or to miss noticing, or rejecting, incremental or invisible changes lurking below the radar. Perhaps most important of all, we must never, ever recalibrate our way into complacency, and thus ultimate collusion.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics, and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.

www.elayne-clift.com